Southern China

So, I'm back now and busy picking up the various threads of my life--classes, friends, the search for employment--but I'm going to devote the next several blog posts to my recent vacation. Unless something exciting happens here in Wuhan, which I'm guessing it won't.

1/7-1/8

I'll start from the beginning. The Wednesday I left, I still had two final exams to give and all of my grades to record. This is how I motivate myself. I buy a train ticket to Shenzhen and use the departure date and time as my deadline for finishing all of my work. (As with anything schedule-related, the school was pretty fuzzy on when I had to turn grades in.) I gave finals, ran home, and had my travel buddy Cori record my grades while I finished packing. I'd like to think it wasn't all my fault, that my laundry had taken longer to dry than expected, on account of the cold. But who remembers. I might've also been cleaning, not wanting to leave a lot for the rats.

The train ride was fine, aside from the usual Chinese guys sidling up to me, snoring, and hawking up unmentionable fluids. I slept on the narrow bed next to my backpack filled with five weeks' worth of stuff. Cori and I arrived in Shenzhen early the next morning. Already, we noticed a change from the blustery weather in Wuhan. The sun was shining, the air was calm, and it actually felt easier to breathe. We began killing time before our evening flight to Thailand by stopping off at the nearest McDonalds for breakfast. The scene of us trudging into a restaurant with giant backpacks, as if we were grabbing a quick McMuffin before mounting an expedition into the Swiss Alps, was to become a familiar one.

We did a lot of walking, and when that got old, we hopped on the metro line. And when that got old...well...we saw a movie. We had a lot of time to kill. It was a Chinese film, and if that wasn't enough to hamper our interest, it was a sequel. Luckily, action films don't need much translating. After that, we hit the Starbucks. Shenzhen was surprisingly clean and Westernized that way. Later, after dinner, we found a shuttle to the airport and made friends with a Canadian man on the way. He spoke a fair amount of Chinese, said he was also on his way to Thailand, and since our gate was nearly impossible to find, he was a big help. Now let me wrap up the entry with my experience on Air Asia.

Being a low-cost carrier, they don't do jetways. They take all the passengers waiting at the gate and herd them onto a bus, which then drives across the tarmac to the plane. There are no seat assignments. As the doors of the bus opened, I felt the crowd behind me contract, pushing ever harder toward the waiting plane, bursting into a mad dash for the stairs. This is the kind of thing that, as far as I know, happens only in China. I may be wrong, but weren't we all sitting in the same section of the same plane going to the same place? Is the difference between a window seat and an aisle seat really worth throwing elbows over?

I put on my headphones and reminded myself that I'd be in Bangkok by morning.